Category Archives: eng

Last night I watched the first and second episodes of “Shameless”, three years after this TV series’ premier. I am still not sure what to think of it: should I continue watching it? From what I understand, season 4 is around the corner, starting this January.

“Shameless” wants to, at least, be funny and sexy, and it can be funny and sexy, but it travels an uncomfortable path to do so. For me, as a viewer, the first problem is the exaggerated number of characters: a family of eight, plus a network of friends, acquaintances, foes, and other orbital entities. I remember when I first watched “Breaking Bad” (BB) and how much I enjoyed the lengthy, credible, process of building Walter White and Jesse Pinkman… contrast this with “Shameless” and its gamut of people, thrown at you in the very first minutes, as creatures ranging from drunk to sober, young to old, gay to straight, smart to intelligent and dumb… it is a much different building process, eventually as effective as BB’s, but – again – I think it is too early to say.

At times, “Shameless” can remember “Californication”, which makes it unsuitable to watch with young kids around; it also often asks for viewer credit, as in “please endure a few more moments and this will feel right”. On the other hand, it is original, it features very good acting and, until now, I think no one fired a gun, which is oh so refreshing. It can get better. Will it get better?

New year, new site. This time I made the very difficult option to start from tabula rasa, saying goodbye to nearly 1 GB of data, corresponding to many posts since 1996. Of course there was no WordPress CMS in 1996: those were the days when I coded each post by hand, in plain HTML, and… it was fun, it really was. The Web has since become industrialized and personal sites like mine simply don’t stand a chance in the market of attention now; however I just want to rediscover the fun and the learning that can happen in a humble Web presence. So it all restarts, again.